#anyways this is the point where its relevant to note leif doesnt actually remember the whole Selkie Thing after leifs request

[mantisgodsaus]

there isn't really a specific question on the ask games that fits but we want to hear you talk about what muse is/was like in selkieverse. she fascinates us based on the roughly two things you've said about her

Yes we can do this absolutely! Fair warning - There Are Things Here We Are Not Stating, mainly for spoiler reasons. Hopefully, they are excluded cleanly enough that this still flows well, but this is a long-ass thing so

Muse, though she wasn't a selkie herself, was close enough to Leif that he felt entirely safe leaving her with care of his pelt. She knew that he was a selkie pretty much from the moment that she met him - there wasn't quite as much baggage built up around the risks of having your pelt just Out And About, at the time, though a lot of selkies were a bit skittish about it, and Leif didn't really hide things.

A marriage, at least for moths, is more a contract of trust than anything else - an expression of trust, a unification of families, and so on and so forth. Somewhat more of one for selkies, with the big blaring weak spot they've got - it's a lot like showing your back to someone and just... hoping that they don't fuck you over. You welcome this particular bug into your family and you trust that they'll watch your back and help raise your children and look after your family when you're gone.

She was the usual person to keep ahold of Leif's pelt during expeditions, so as to keep it safe even when his bug body was in danger from being hurt or killed. She was trusted to keep it safe, or to use it for its transformation if the need ever presented itself - it was more shared between them than anything else during the later stages of their life together, and that meant that she was very, very familiar with how it felt.

Leif died in Snakemouth after having given her his pelt for safekeeping. Just to make sure he had an anchor. Just to make sure he didn't go too deep. Just to make sure that, if something happened, she would know he was okay from the heartbeat of his pelt - or, that if it went cold, she would know to stop, and get out while she still could.

She felt his death in the pelt wrapped around her shoulders. The aftereffects of the venom coursing through his veins, reflected in his pelt, giving the warning she needed to order a repeat. She felt his death throes reflected in the very literal piece of himself still trusted with her all the way out, and all the way home.

She sat at home after submitting the report that declared his death, a dead pelt still settled around her shoulders, standing over the shells of their eggs, knowing that the larvae were in the Ant Nursery where she couldn't know if they were all right or if her whole family had been killed where she couldn't even see, and she felt the shudder of a body restarting as the cordyceps settled into his husk.

Muse knew, for absolute certain, that he died. She felt his death throes. She felt his heart stop on her back. She also knew, for an absolute fact, that he was alive after that, even if she didn't know how or in what form. She knew this, and she could feel the dull pulse of his cordyceps self starting to take over his body in his skin, and she could feel the sealskin starting to change under her fingertips, and she was deadly, deadly afraid of looking away- of taking it off, or simply ceasing to pay attention for slightly too long, and returning to find it dead and vacant again. To that end, she just... didn't take it off.

She didn't take it off, in fact, for several years. Past the point where people thought she was in shock and morning and long into the point that people thought that her husband's death had broken something irreparable in her. She continued to wear it long after her children had emerged from the ant nursery, and long after they had begun to grow into fully-fledged selkies of their own, and long after they had the context to know about It All.

She got into arguments about it. As far as anyone else knew, she was dragging her dead husband's equally dead pelt around 24/7, and once her kids were old enough to understand that whole situation, there was a certain awareness of "hey, this is maybe a bit fucking bizarre to do, don't really like that". It was, in particular, a recurring argument with the son that would eventually become known as Grandpa, as he was of the firm opinion that it was Fucking Weird to walk around with a loved one's dead pelt twenty years after said loved one's death, and that she shouldn't Do That.

Unfortunately for him, this was not an argument he was going to win. Muse, being as stubborn as a bull and with no particular regard to what the neighbours thought, had been doubling down on this particular argument for twenty-eight years already. She had chosen to see this through, and no one could really convince her otherwise, though many of her children would try.

As such, she would remain "that weird lady carrying around her dead husband's pelt and skulking around doing who-knows-what since there's no damn way her husband's life insurance and her dispatch salary from the explorer's association would account for the care and feeding of eight kids plus herself without at least a few jobs in-between and no one knows what the hell she does for a living". The argument, however, would continue.

It would continue, in fact, until after Grandpa had had kids of her own, when Muze was fairly young. The old argument got brought up again, Muse refused to entertain the idea of maybe not being seen as The Local Weirdo, she went off to her room with the usual pelt. She sat, alone, in her room, thinking about the whole Situation. She put on the pelt.

This time, specifically, she chose to put it on in such a way to attempt to shift into Leif's selkie form. It had been years with barely any chance in it, after all. Though she had initially feared disrupting whatever delicate balance was keeping him alive, it had been stable for long enough that she was pretty sure that wearing it wouldn't disrupt something, and she... wanted the assurance, really, that she wasn't going mad. That her choices were based on truth - and that he was still out there, somewhere, even if dead-and-resurructed.

It... worked. With some caveats.

At this point, Leif was entirely merged with the cordyceps components, entirely hosted on crystal hardware, and the mirror that his pelt offered to his body was one where the bone marrow, connective tissue, and structure had entirely been eaten away by now, and the vast majority of the flesh was now composed of cordyceps tendrils that were a whole lot more obvious when they were puppeting around a skin suit with an internal skeleton, and not a relatively rigid exoskeleton.

No one could really deny that her old paramour was alive enough to animate a pelt. Unfortunately, no one could deny that whatever the fuck had happened to him, it had warped his selkie form beyond anything that anyone had really expected to be possible, and absolutely no one wanted to learn what the fuck his body looked like back in Snakemouth, or what form he was alive in, and no one really wanted to touch the pelt that had offered a form like that.

In particular, no one really wanted to see that particular pelt anywhere that someone might try to put it on after that whole fiasco, and no one was particularly fond of the idea of continuing to let Grandma Muse walk around with the living pelt of whatever her partner had become.

After a great deal of arguing, she accepted the compromise of hanging it over the mantelpiece, where she could keep an eye on it even without physically wearing it. She would then proceed to relocate herself to the living room for most of the rest of her days, if only to make absolutely certain that that faint, dull hum beneath the skin was still active- that he was still alive out there, somewhere, in whatever form.

Against all odds, she would live to see his awakening. Unfortunately, she would not live to see him actually return to his family - just to see the tell-tale shudder of a pelt growing active again, as miles below, Leif stirred from his slumber.

Her family are currently engaged in Trying Very Hard Not To Think About The Whole Situation. They are fairly certain that whatever the pelt belongs to, it's still in Snakemouth Den. They are fairly certain that Leif's relation to the family is through it, though theories are more "he's the kid of whatever-it-is and a different moth" than assuming that he Is In Fact Todd's Great-Grandfather.

No one really wants to take the pelt down from the mantelpiece at the moment, and absolutely no one wants to explain the whole Situation to Leif unless they have a better idea of what he's inherited from his other parent, but there's also enough shit going on with them in general that it might just never get brought up until someone directly mentions it.

Leif is currently under the impression that Muse remarried to a selkie because the whole "being a selkie" thing wasn't terribly relevant to the way that his current cordyceps took up residence and after that whole Situation he was not especially eager to delve into previously repressed memories.

Predictably, this whole setup goes Terribly when poked at, especially as Leif's pelt is a whole lot more autonomous than your average selkie pelt, being more than a century old by now and belonging to a fungus who is very much set up in a way where his disconnected individual body parts can act autonomously on remnants of whatever priorities are/were in the main control system.

It is still hung over the mantelpiece.